Cody and Christian Osgood argue that waiting for perfect plans kills momentum in real estate investing. They launched their website with bugs, landed a seller-financed six-plex from their first consulting call, and closed a 38-unit deal that opened doors to smaller multifamily properties. Start messy, learn fast, get paid.
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Hey YouTube, this is Cody. I'm back in the country this week for Real Estate Principles. I've got Christian next to me today, and today we're going over why done is better than perfect.
Now if you haven't yet, like, subscribe. We're going to dive right into this video. So done is way more important than perfect. There's often debate on how good do things need to be. That is extremely important.
Quality over quantity, right?
Yeah, perfection's always the goal. Pursue perfection, but at the end of the day, there are way too many people out there, way, way too many people who do not accomplish anything because they want it to be perfect. We have a policy when we go and launch products, whenever anything is new, we actually originally got this idea from Grant Cardone. Sometimes we go out and we sell before the product is even, like the concept's even done. We know we're gonna deliver, we know we're gonna come out with it, it's gonna be great, but it doesn't matter if no one knows about it. So sometimes we just get out, we market, we talk about things, and we push before the product's even created. Then it launches and we get different iterations.
And our very first time we ever did the consulting, we didn't even know what we were going to say right before we got started. I mean, we got people that signed up and then 5 minutes before the call, we're like, okay, uh, what are we going to talk about today? And they have since— one of the very first people ever just bought into a seller-financed sixplex. So if we had just focused on being perfect day one, they wouldn't be in a sixplex today. Today. That was seller finance. I mean, they may have bought something else, but we wouldn't have been able to contribute to help them. So when we're going out into the marketplace and just doing anything, buying real estate, building companies, done is the priority while we're going to pursue perfection. We want everything to be as good as possible. If we just prioritize that above all else, we're not going to get anything done.
One of the— at least when we're out publicly, one of the largest pieces of feedback I get is people go, I don't know how you did what you did so quickly. Now, if you've watched how we built our portfolio, there's nothing magical about it. It's ridiculously simple. The speed that we did it is extremely uncommon, and the way we did that is, it's commit first, figure the rest out later. Done was better than perfect on a lot of our stuff. We learned shortly after launching our website, themultifamilystrategy.com, we learned that there's a way to turn on higher video quality. Oops, had no idea. Also, when we first launched, I since fixed this, turns out we recorded everything in mono, which means everything went through the right ear.
Thank you for letting us know in the comments. Someone let us know.
And we really appreciate that. We fixed it. It's a lot more perfect than it was. The importance was we got it launched, and through that, people are already starting to do deals, fund each other's deals. We created a community. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. Was it optimized? No. I was told that videos should be 4 to 8 minutes. A lot of them are 2 minutes. And you know what? We said what we needed to say in those 2 minutes, and it's moving people forward. Now we get to record new content, more engaging backgrounds. We'll build it out as we go, but we have colors. We have the privilege of doing this because we got the first step done. And if you're diving into real estate right now, that's what we're going to talk about for the remainder of this video. If you're diving in, you've got to get started. It's the most important piece.
Yeah, and our biggest deal ever, we bought 38 apartment units. We filmed a little bit. We need to be putting more of that Sorry, we need to do more of that. However, we went and bought the 38-unit and we structured the down payment that we raised as equity. We gave up equity and eventually we had to buy them out and that cost a lot of money. We were making monthly payments on that still to this day. But that said, you know, we knocked that out, we get 100% ownership of it, and it just— it was a learning lesson, but we got the deal done. And that deal was what allowed us to get onto BiggerPockets, Business Insider, and getting it done was senior to making sure everything was perfect. Now, if we had done it perfect, it probably would have saved us a few hundred thousand dollars. But the upside from getting it done is gonna make us millions of dollars over the course of our careers.
And it made us a million dollars in the first 6 months of the deal.
Yeah, it's still a great deal.
We lost hundreds of thousands of dollars though, the way we structured it. I want to emphasize that that is a lot of money to us right now, today. That is, that is a lot of money.
It's a big deal.
But we got it done, and it would have cost us $1 million not to do the deal. The million that we made was worth losing the few hundred thousand that we could have made had we done everything perfect, had we gone slower. And you know what, if we went slower, we might not have closed that deal. We might not have got it done.
Yeah. And in the beginning, we operated off the information that we had. Looking back, yeah, we could operate a lot more efficiently. We could save a lot more money, and we'd probably make a lot more money in the process. You know, you got saving in one hand, making in the other. We could probably have gotten both. However, we didn't. We just got it done.
And net-net, what, what ended up happening? We closed the 38-unit deal, we made some money. That story and that momentum helped us get into our next few deals. So that resulted in another 6-plex, 2 more triplexes, 7-plex, a 10-plex. Now where you have these buildings that have come up, we've expanded and grown. And guess what? We learned from the way we structured that first deal. These next deals have new structures. There's less holes in the ship, it's more perfect than it was before, and we keep marching forward. If you want to move fast, you have to just get the steps in front of you done. Get new problems that you work on for your next project.
Now let's think about it in your shoes, because right now maybe you have rentals, maybe you don't. It's more important to go out and buy cash-flowing real estate than it is to make sure you're just getting seller finance deals, you know, getting that perfect unicorn deal. You should go out and get something that cash flows, get it done, build your story, and then start duplicating that. It's a lot easier to multiply 2 than it is to multiply 0. A lot of people that are watching this have reached out like, I want to go buy a 12-plex for my first deal. That is great and it's doable. A lot of people can do it, but it shouldn't be the end-all be-all of success as a 12-plex. If all you did was buy a duplex and then you refined your systems and then you maybe bought a seller-financed 8-plex, You can scale this over time, but getting it done will make you a lot more money than trying to get that perfect similar model that I went out and did, or other people went out and did, because you can't make money on deals you don't own. Yes, you can wholesale, but all the wholesalers kick themselves in the long term. Go out and start achieving your goals by just going out and doing it. Forget perfection. Do you need to work on the legal? Yes. Does it need to be perfect day one? No, because you don't have anything to protect right now. Go out and start making little steps to make it happen. And at the end of the day, prioritize getting it done, not being perfect.
And if you noticed on this channel, it's called Multifamily Strategy. It's about building a goal that matches— or sorry, building a plan that matches your goals. You need more tools in the tool belt. We share everything that we have. That does not mean that there's everything out there is covered on this channel. We don't buy a ton of small buildings. Sure, we have some duplexes, but we don't do a lot of that. We have friends who've done amazing with larger units and bigger spaces. We'll include them in this channel. We'll see Dion on in another week or so once we get the video uploaded out to you. But again, done's better than perfect. Probably not even going to edit it. I'm just going to throw it up there and we're going to get the content to you as soon as humanly possible. You need to build your own plan, your own goal, and then just go after it, whatever those steps look like. If that's seller finance 12-plex, if that's doing a BRRRR, if that's going out and buying something conventional, getting a duplex— that's where I started.
He actually started with a house.
Technically, yes, I did start with the house. I do not recommend doing that. You can skip that step, start buying multifamily. However, build a strategy towards you, towards your own goals. Know that done is better than perfect. You'll keep pursuing perfection through the rest of your career.
All right, but that's it for today's video. Since I'm back in the country, I will be here on the next few videos. If you haven't already, like and drop a comment for the questions you want to see on next week's Whiteboard Wednesday, and have a fantastic weekend.
